Offer your dissent

How About Coming Home for Good?

We can always expect the Super Bowl to be packed with sentimental troop worship and pro-military propaganda for the masses. See our post on Fascism and Football and the Budweiser commercial above. In the background, I believe JennaAnne is singinga revised version of “I’m Coming Home” by Diddy:

“…the Pentagon conducted an astonishingly vigorous and comprehensive public relations campaign that provided it with public visibility and with a familiar, readily accepted presence across a wide array of popular cultural activities. During the Bush administration this included a program specifically designed to encourage Americans to support US troops, and to create among US military personnel an impression that their efforts and sacrifices are valued back home and that the American public stands behind them as they continue the occupation of Iraq and the indefinite war on terror. This double-edged sword aimed at both a public and a military audience was called America Supports You (ASY).” –“Support the Troops”: Populist Militarism and the Cultural Reproduction of Imperial Power, Mark Rupert, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University

We think coming home is a great idea, but how about letting the troops come home for good? That’s something we could get behind. Check out Come Home America. Their effort aims to unite the political Right and political Left against war: “Americans united in their alarm about the destructive consequences of our country’s runaway militarism.” You may not have heard of them though, because, as far as I know, unlike the Pentagon, Come Home America does not have the funds to procure a multimillion contract with a big time public relations firm. Also, Come Home America has, as far as I know, exactly zero “major corporate sponsors.”

The Church teaches us the Way of holiness by pointing us to the truth. The government tries to brainwash us by spending millions of dollars on public relations and advertising campaigns.

Pope Pius XI’s words in his encyclical on the power of the motion picture, Vigilanti Cura, are of particular note here (television advertising could also be considered moving or motion pictures in short form):

…there does not exist today a means of influencing the masses more potent than the cinema. The reason for this is to be sought for in the very nature of the pictures projected upon the screen, in the popularity of motion picture plays, and in the circumstances which accompany them.

The power of the motion picture consists in this, that it speaks by means of vivid and concrete imagery which the mind takes in with enjoyment and without fatigue. Even the crudest and most primitive minds which have neither the capacity nor the desire to make the efforts necessary for abstraction or deductive reasoning are captivated by the cinema. In place of the effort which reading or listening demands, there is the continued pleasure of a succession of concrete and, so to speak, living pictures. This power is still greater in the talking picture for the reason that interpretation becomes even easier and the charm of music is added to the action of the drama. Dances and variety acts which are sometimes introduced between the films serve to increase the stimulation of the passions.

And then there’s Hitler in Mein Kampf:

“To whom has propaganda to appeal? It has to appeal forever and only to the masses! It has to make use of small and smallest minds. . . . Propaganda has to be directed at the great masses and its efficiency has to be measured exclusively by its effective success.”